The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

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The Washington Post’s neologism contest winners.

December 2, 2019July 21, 2023 1365

I came across this today and broke up laughing. These are seriously clever! Thanks to the Washington Post. I wasn’t aware of their neologism contest, but I am now! Read and enjoy. Pass it along.

No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing.

E. B. White

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

Just don’t be boring!

Robert Liebmann

If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.

William C. Gault

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.

Michael Burke

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.

Ernest Hemingway

If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

Stan Lee

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself.

Harlan Ellison

I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.

J.K. Rowling

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

Jim Morrison

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

Edward Albee

It always comes down to characters, and individual stories about courage.

Steven Bochco

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.

Orson Scott Card

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Matthew Arnold

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

Stephen Wright

It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.

William Goldman

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Tom Clancy

Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.